Writing
Books:
The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit. University of Nevada Press. 2018. Mining & Society Series. (Received the Clark Spence Award for the Best Book in Mining History, 2017-2018.)
Feasts and Festivals: The Story of Winter Traditions at Augustana College (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Historical Society and East Hall Press, November 2023). A short book I edited that contains some of my writing as well as writing and interviews completed by students in my oral history course.
I am currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Imaginary Mines: Monster Movies, Sad Songs, Tough-Guy TV, & Other Places Mining Appears in American Pop Culture.
Writing that is brief and easy to access:
“Zombie Mines and Bloody Valentines,” Network in Canadian Environmental History, February 2020.
Selected Scholarly Articles & Chapters:
“Canary in the Coal Mine: From Mine Safety Technique to Animal Metaphor,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal (November 2023), Published online ahead of print: https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2278374.
“Sweet Solution, Sticky Situation: Mill Technology, Organized Labor, and the Midwestern Origins of High Fructose Corn Syrup,” Middle West Review 10, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 93-126.
“Feeling Senti-metal: Frontier Nostalgia, Mining Masculinity, and Corporate Landscapes in the U.S. American Reality Series TV Series Gold Rush,” in To the Last Drop: Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality, eds. Axelle Germanaz, Daniela Gutiérrez Fuentes, Sarah Marak, Paul Heike (Berlin and Bielefeld, Germany: Verlag, 2023), 137-162.
“Butte Undermined: Complaint Files, Community Activism, and the Slow Violence of Mine Subsidence in Butte, Montana, 1940-1990,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 72, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 21-37.
“Confronting Kennecott: The Lost City of Bingham Canyon and the History of Mining-Induced Resettlement,” in Born with a Copper Spoon: A Global History of Copper and How It Fed the Modern World, eds. Robrecht Declercq, Hans Otto Froland, and Duncan Money (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, November 2022), 183-203.
“Making Locals through Local Agriculture: Citizenship and Urban Gardens in Rock Island, Illinois, 1913-2018,” with Christopher Strunk, Food, Culture & Society, published online April 2021, paper print in November 2021.
“Nuclear Free Montana: Grassroots Environmentalism and Montana’s Antinuclear Initiatives,” in Nature and the Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945-1990, eds. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J.R. McNeill (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 116-136.
“Competition, Community, and Entertainment: The Anaconda Company’s Promotion of Mine Safety in Butte, Montana, 1915-1942,” The Mining History Journal 24, no. 1 (2017): 19-39. (Received the John Townley Award for Best Article Published in the Mining History Journal in 2017.)
“Protest, Power, and the Pit: Fighting Open-Pit Mining in Butte, Montana,” Montana The Magazine of Western History 62, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 24-43. (Received the Vivian A. Palladin Award for best article published in Montana: The Magazine of Western History in 2012.)
Book Reviews:
I write a lot of book reviews. Here are a few that are easy to access:
Participant in “Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power,” H-Environment Roundtable 13, no. 3 (March 2023).
Review of John Sandlos and Arn Keeling. Mining Country: A History of Canada’s Mines and Miners. (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 2021), Network in Canadian History and Environment, July 14, 2022.
Review of Coal County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West (University of Utah Press, 2019), H-Environment, H-Net Reviews, April 2021.
“Even Bigger than the Great Lakes: On Nancy Langston’s Sustaining Lake Superior.” Review of Nancy Langston, Sustaining Lake Superior: an Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (Yale University Press, 2017), Cleveland Review of Books, December 26, 2019.
Interviews & Presentations
If you want to hear me talking history try the following interviews:
2019 “The Richest Hill on Earth,” Episode 4 “We Gave It To the Pit,” interview on Montana Public Radio show about the mining history of Butte, Montana
2019 “Digging Deeper in Butte, Montana,” Lives of the Mind, podcast by students at Augustana College
2018 “The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit,” Interview on New Books Network, podcast interview by Christine Lamberson
Presentations at conferences include the following:
2020 “Leveling Up by Digging Down: The Portrayal of Mining and Sustainability in Video Game Genres.” With George Boone. Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency, Virtual Conference Sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.
2020 “(Post)Colonial Adventures in Mining: The Portrayal of Mine Exploration in North American Reality Television” Extraction: Tracing the Veins, Virtual Conference Hosted by Massey University’s Political Ecology Research Centre (New Zealand) and the Wageningen University Centre for Space, Place and Society (The Netherlands). Virtual Conference.